Hi, could somebody give me a link for a good tutorial for Hair in Maya 8.0, please? I want to do real hair, not paintFX and I will use it for animation. Thank you

GothTropic411

09-23-2006, 08:30 PM

I see you're having the trouble as I am with this Maya Hair stuff--I made a similar post several days ago and have gotten no answers.
I'm sorry I can't give you any good tutorials (some of the ones I've seen are rather unclear), but I can tell you what I've learned so far:

1) Model a lofted NURBS surface out of EP curves to look like hair, or model polygons into the shape you want (no tris!) and then convert it to Subsurfaces, and finally Subdivision Surface-> NURBS.
2) With that finished, you need to convert the surface curves. To do this, you go to Curves-> Curve Offset.
3) Delete your original surface and EP curves, leaving behind the converted curves.
4) Group those together for easier management, and move onto the hair menu in Dynamics. In the Hair menu, find "Make Selected Curves Dynamic". New curves should appear under the first ones, and they will move in a simulation with the Timeline.
5) In the Outliner, find your Hair Output Curves and click on their name to select them. select a Paint FX brush in the Visor, go back to Hair, then click on Hair->Assign Paint FX to Curves. Whatever you chose in PaintFX will adhere to the curves now.

What I have here is basically how you work with hair. Do NOT expect Pixar-quality hair, they have their own custom code for it which makes it grow directly from a skullcap, but Maya hair is adequate enough for the amateur. As long as the physics don't screw in simulation and you have decent-looking PaintFX, don't worry about it. Cheers. :)

med21

09-24-2006, 01:56 PM

Video Tutorial (Hair)

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=5903856

sh4dow

09-24-2006, 02:06 PM

good to know that 3dsmax has such an awesome feature built-in - why autodesk didn't manage including this in maya as well... hopefully we'll see that happen in v9.0 next year...

Gloor

09-24-2006, 05:53 PM

The video is only for Max :(

Video Tutorial (Hair)

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=5903856

FloydBishop

09-24-2006, 07:00 PM

What are you trying to do exactly? Maya's hair system can be pretty powerful. You can also grow hair from a skullcap, with no custom coding needed.

To grow hair from a skullcap:

Make a duplicate of your character's head.

Select the faces you want the hair to grow from.

Invert the selection and delete those non growth faces. This will give you your skullcap.

Thats a link to Digital Tutors Hair DVD's. They are great for beginners, as far as getting more info. There are a few books out there as well, check autodesks site if you dont mind paying.

I reccommend plowing through the docs. It can be painful, but unfortunately there isnt much out there for Maya Hair. One last thing, check out the hair examples under the hair menu. There are detailed notes. Take the examples and break them down, if you are vigialant you will emerge victorious.

Good Luck

Gloor

09-25-2006, 07:01 PM

Hello guys,
thank you for your help. Well, my problem is quite simple. I created hair using PaintFX and achieved great result but then decided to convert the curves into dynamic ones. I still had nice result except few things (hair went into the mesh, length was changing drastically ) and I was advised to do hair as hair (not to use paintFX). You can see the whole problem here. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=396150&goto=newpost

So, what I want to do now is to create hair as hair and have the dynamic effect from the very beginning. I don't mind paying for a good DVD tutorial (gnomon or any) but I don't like books. I was never good with books so please could you avoid them in your advice? :))
Well, I notice that in Maya 8 you can paint follicles straight on the mesh and I kinda liked the result as it was really interactive but I need to know more as I had only experience with PaintFX. :) I don't mind very hard tutorial (even though I'm not english native speaker) but I want thorough one with good explanation and great result. Don't really need "pixar like" result but you get the picture from those pics I have in the other thread.

DUNCAN - what about your advice??
Thank you guys

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